12 June 2016

Queen Mary's Bar Brooch

Queen Mary's Bar Brooch

A round pearl is at the center of this interesting brooch, crossed by a waving diamond bar with a three-diamond clover at either end. The brooch is identified and named in Leslie Field's The Queen's Jewels, where it is traced back to Queen Mary as early as 1931.

Queen Mary wears the brooch on her bodice, with Princess Elizabeth

The brooch apparently passed to The Queen along with the rest of Queen Mary's remaining jewels after her death in 1953, but it wasn't used again until the 1980s, when it made a couple of appearances at the Royal Windsor Horse Show. Those appearances have remained the main sightings of the brooch on The Queen.

However, Queen Mary's Bar Brooch made a surprise reappearance as The Queen peeked out a Buckingham Palace window to check out the scene of the Patron's Lunch organized on The Mall for her 90th birthday. Perhaps its appearances remain inside the palace, or underneath coats adorned with other brooches.